Committers

The Roles and Responsibilities document describes the general role of a
committer on an incubating project. This page provides links to
more information to help new committers get started.

Mailing Lists

Everything -- but everything-- inside the Apache world
occurs or is reflected in email. As some people say, 'If it isn't
in my email, it didn't happen.' Decisions only get made on public
Apache mail lists -- not anywhere off list, such as IRC, IM, or private
emails.

Each project has a set of lists, which are typically called
project-dev, project-user, and
project-commits. A few Apache-wide lists cross all boundaries, including:

committers: sends important messages to all
Apache committers; it's not used for discussions;

community: where all Apache committers can
discuss things that are about Apache;

infrastructure: where the roots and the
infrastructure team discuss and work on the Apache
infrastructure needs;

legal-discuss: where Apache committers can
ask questions that have a legal aspect;

Apache also has private lists. For example, your project will
probably have a private mail list named project-private,
which your Podling PMC will use for sensitive discussions. Never
mix public and private mail lists in the same post -- see the
section titled Balancing confidentiality and public discussion
in How it
Works. For example, never include both your dev and private
lists in the same post. Posting to the dev list is sufficient
because each member of your Podling PMC will also be on that
list.

Project Web Site

The Incubator Podling Websites guide documents how to get
your project web site going.

Committer Resources

Subscribe to the infrastructure list, then
raise awareness on your project on what goes on behind the
scenes.

Be proactive about responding to infrastructure issues on
your project mailing lists. Does the web server seem to be
down? Is Jira or Subversion down? Check the status of servers
and explain the reason to your project lists (as you can
see, no need to alert the ASF infrastructure people).